Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Ohio State University student Abdul Razak Ali Artan on Monday morning set off a fire alarm on campus, then drove his car into the crowd of students evacuating the building. Then he jumped out of his car and began stabbing people with a butcher knife. In a departure from the usual denial and obfuscation, Columbus Police Chief Kim Jacobs was refreshingly honest, saying: “I think we have to consider that it is” a terror attack. Leftists took advantage of the occasion to call for gun control, which might have been a cogent argument were it not for one inconvenient detail: Artan didn’t have a gun. But above all, Artan was a “refugee”: the attack vindicates President-elect Trump on Muslim immigration.

...Mitchell describes the day he was questioning Khalid Sheik Mohammed, when the 9/11 mastermind announced he had something important to say. “KSM then launched into a gory and detailed description of how he beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl,” Mitchell writes. Up to that moment, the CIA did not know KSM had personally carried out the murder. When asked whether it was “hard to do” (meaning emotionally difficult), KSM misunderstood the question. “Oh, no, no problem,” KSM said, “I had very sharp knives. Just like slaughtering sheep.”

o confirm his story, the CIA had KSM reenact the beheading so that it could compare the features of his hands and forearms to those in the video of Pearl’s murder. “Throughout the reenactment, KSM smiled and mugged for the cameras. Sometimes he preened,” Mitchell writes. When informed that the CIA had confirmed that he was telling the truth, KSM smiled.

President-elect Donald Trump has stated that infrastructure will be one of his top priorities upon taking office, and many in Congress have signaled a willingness to act on infrastructure. However, the Trump Administration and Congress should evaluate the needs of the nation and make structurally sound reforms rather than rushing to pass an infrastructure package focused on politically motivated short-term spending.

Infrastructure Priorities

When crafting an agenda for addressing the nation’s infrastructure, the Trump Administration and Congress should:

It didn’t take long for the Monday car and knife jihad attack at Ohio State University to turn into a gun control rallying cry.

First reports and reports throughout the duration of the attack described it as a shooting. Authorities later clarified it was a knife attack. Minutes after news broke that there was an alleged active shooter, Twitter users called for stronger gun control and blamed the attack on lackluster laws.

QOTD: "...socialism’s failure in Cuba was even more spectacular and damaging than its failure in other parts of the world. In the USSR itself, and in parts of eastern Europe, socialist economic construction may have taken a harsh human toll and ultimately led to stagnation, but along the way at least it created an industrial base. Nothing of the kind happened in Cuba. As an economic planner, Fidel was one of the great failures of the 20th century. Even by socialist standards, he was a flop." --Walter Russell Mead

Sunday, November 27, 2016

Barack Obama has two faces. After Trump’s victory and Hillary’s defeat, the public Obama has been gracious and diplomatic. His lectures to Trump, directly and indirectly, are couched in praise. He echoed the feeling of millions on both sides when he said, "We are now all rooting for his success”.

That’s a lie. Or rather a disguise.

Obama and his aides had, in one insider narrative, decided to don the “mask of decorum”. The contempt for Trump still seeps through the mask. And the mask hides Obama’s next big move.

As everyone already knows, on Friday the business section of The Washington Post published an article about so-called “fake news” propagated on the Internet. The Russian propaganda services are said to be behind this disinformation, with many American websites helping to spread it, deliberately or otherwise.

One of the WaPo’s principal sources for the story was a website called “PropOrNot”. For some reason the author, Craig Timberg, failed to link the site, although he linked many others. However, in its post on the piece, Zero Hedge provides a link to the 200 “fake news” websites listed by PropOrNot. Gates of Vienna was not illustrious enough to make the Post’s article, but PropOrNot has honored us by including us in the list of sites that retail “fake news”.

Interestingly enough, much more prominent sites were omitted from that list, including Jihad Watch. I’ll discuss the likely reasons for such omissions, but first I’d like to look at the “journalism” practiced by The Washington Post, which relies on PropOrNot and other “independent researchers” to designate a wide swath of information sources as inadequate, inferior, and false, branding them as worthy of shunning and shaming.

QOTD: "Now there’s the Jill Stein/Green Party instigated recount effort under way in Wisconsin and perhaps Michigan. But I thought the idea of election fraud was a Republican boogie man! It is fun watching the left’s continuing meltdown in real time." --Steven Hayward

Friday, November 25, 2016

What do you think about this “new nationalism”? Do you think it's new? What does it mean? Does it mean putting America first? Does it, in fact, put America first? Has this new nationalism been tried before? It very much has.

New nationalism

The phrase "new nationalism" was actually coined by Theodore Roosevelt in a speech he gave in Kansas on Sept. 1, 1910. In that speech, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, later to become a Progressive Party candidate, in essence denounced the Declaration of Independence, and embraced the new nationalism.

He rejected the American heritage, in many respects, the limitations placed on the federal government, and he argued for a powerful central government that would take care of the general welfare of the people. It was a quintessential, aggressive, progressive speech. This is a speech that the Left venerates. In fact, Barack Obama, just a few years ago, visited the exact site where Theodore Roosevelt gave this speech. He gave his own speech and was extremely complimentary of Roosevelt’s.

Roosevelt thought that the general welfare of the people — their health, education, basic jobs and wages, and so forth — should be determined by the federal government. The Republican Party was the progressive party. The Democrat Party became the progressive party. You had two Progressive Era parties. The Republican Party, under Theodore Roosevelt, then William Howard Taft (albeit less so), and then of course Woodrow Wilson, who took the Democrat Party to the hard Left in what's known as the Progressive Era.

A new study just released by the USDA, offers a very detailed look at exactly how participants in the "Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program" (SNAP, aka Food Stamps) spend their taxpayer-funded subsidies. Unfortunately for taxpayers, the amount of money spent on soft drinks and other unnecessary junk foods/drinks is fairly staggering. But, we suppose it's a nice taxpayer funded subsidy for the soda industry...so score one for Warren Buffett and the Coca Cola lobbyists.

Per the study, nearly $360mm, or 5.4% of the $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on soft drinks alone. In fact, soft drinks represent the single largest "commodity" purchased by SNAP participants with $100mm more spent on sodas than milk and $150mm more than beef.

QOTD: "The Democrats didn’t respond to their defeat, one of a sequence, by trying to move to the center. Instead there is every sign that they are moving further to the left. Keith Ellison, a radical leftist with an anti-Semitic past, is tipped to head the DNC. Schumer still has the Senate, but Elizabeth Warren may have it before too long. Combine that with Obama as the president-in-exile and the Dems will be more radical and extremist than they were even when Obama was sitting in the White House.

The Democrats are ceasing to be a national party. Instead they are becoming a nationalizing party. They are losing their presence in much of the country, from state legislature to state legislature, and becoming the party of major cities and the national government. Their agenda is to move power from local areas to central ones, from the villages and the suburbs to the cities, from states to D.C. and from locally elected legislators in D.C. to the satellite bureaucracies of the Federal government.

Obama sees Hillary’s defeat as an opportunity to burn the Dem’s last bridges with the larger country and its “bitter clingers”, to double down on nationalizing power and to define the political narrative around the agendas of urban elites. The left crippled the Democrats. Now it wants to utterly consume them." --Daniel Greenfield

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

I have only one complaint regarding the splendid news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) to be the next attorney general of the United States: He is such a valuable legislator, he may be irreplaceable in the Senate.

But that's alright. The Senate is going to be the Senate. Plus, there are talented young conservatives with strong legal backgrounds there, so hope springs that one can step into Jeff's big shoes.

By contrast, the Justice Department, the institution in which I proudly spent most of my professional life as a lawyer, is in crisis. For eight years, we have had not the rule of law but a Ruler of Law - the imperial president, Barack Obama, aided and abetted by his hyper-political courtiers Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, derelict in the fundamental duty of his office to execute the laws faithfully.

QOTD: "...why are Obama aides so upset about [Lt. Gen. Michael Fynn – as National Security Advisor], who Foreign Policy magazine reports “as a boy … would help arrange bus rides for Democratic voters on election days in his hometown.”

Simple. Because he warned them about the danger of Obama’s Iraq withdrawal and predicted rise of ISIS – and then, after leaving office, called Obama out for failing to heed that advice.

It was under Flynn’s leadership that DIA issued a classified report in 2012 predicting everything that has come to pass in Iraq since Obama’s withdrawal of American troops – warning that the chaos in Syria was creating conditions that could allow al-Qaeda in Iraq (now ISIS) to make a comeback and declare an Islamic caliphate." --Marc A. Thiessen

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Iran is smuggling weapons to the terrorist group Hezbollah inside commercial flights to Lebanon, the Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations has charged in a letter to the UN Security Council. Such actions would violate several Security Council resolutions.

Citing reports from Israel’s intelligence agencies, Ambassador Danny Danon wrote that “the Iranian Al-Quds Force packs weapons, ammunition and missile technology to Hezbollah in suitcases and puts them on Mahan Air flights.” The transfer of arms to Hezbollah violates Security Council resolutions 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, and 2231, which implemented last year’s nuclear deal with Iran.

QOTD: "To preserve their integrity, scientists should avoid politics and embrace the skeptical rigor that their profession requires. They need to start welcoming conservatives and others who will spot their biases and violate their taboos. Making these changes won’t be easy, but the first step is simple: stop pretending that the threats to science are coming from the Right. Look in the other direction—or in the mirror." --John Tierney